Let's crowdsource a mobile app for Seth Godin  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nukomeet.com/2012/10/Lets_crowdsource_a_mobile_app_for_Seth_Godin/

<comment><USER2> To 'thank him'? The guy makes huge bank on speaking and his books, which is deserved. He gets paid for his work, and for that he can pay for the work he receives. 'Let's work for free for a rich guy' is hardly what I call a good idea.

This isn't a dig on Seth, either, he's a great writer and solid thinker. He deserves what he makes, but I have a serious problem with giving free IP and sweat to a guy who can afford bespoke software.

<comment><USER3>
      > 'Let's work for free for a rich guy' is hardly
      > what I call a good idea.

The whole thing might not be as economically irrational as it might seem at first. Seth Godin is a brand with a large value. Nukomeet is a consulting company and presumably the time they put into the project is returned in the form of a work that can be referenced when pitching work to new clients. For Nukomeet, it's an investment in marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seth Godin writing about crowdsourcing : [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/beyond- crowd...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/beyond- crowdsourcing.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea - I'm absolutely in. However it will be even greater if we take inspiration from Seth's post: building for "beauty", "wonderful", experience, uniqueness etc. That's why we should start with overall design (not only graphics). You code is nice sign of effort and engagement. Now let's use it build something extraordinary. Especially as it's nice, ambitious case: how to make something so trivial like blog reader into valuable thing. So let's start brainstorming the 'problem' we're going to solve with that app. I've got two: 1. Seth's posts are often burned by truckloads of other posts in my 'Favourite' stream. 2. His insights deserve better (than typepad, gReader) visual presentation. What other can we identify?

</comment><comment><USER6> I also think he would love this collaboration rather than choosing between 40 candidates and throwing the work of 39... I'll put my stone to it, hope it'll reach Seth's ears !

</comment><comment><USER4> I guess Seth Godin would like more the idea of a collaborative and open project than just an app made by a random marketing agency for branding.

</comment><comment><USER7> Apparently Seth Godin already received more than 40 applications to make his app for free. Let's make them collaborate instead of compete...

<comment><USER8> No one would really do this for free alone. Maybe not for cash, but I am sure having it in their portfolio would be more than worth it. Being part of a 40 person team, not so much.

It is easier to collaborate on code than design, which is most important as I am sure the code would be trivial, or at least not useful to reuse. 40 designers would seem like a huge mess to me, and 40 programmers would seem a bit overkill.

If I were him I would choose the best of the 40 and pay them a fair rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can see the benefits of riding on the back of somebody elses' brand, never the less I find these kinds of projects really bad fanboy'ism.

</comment><comment><USER10> Collaboration is fine but you need to start with the design, not the code. No one cares what the code looks like.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but it's not about how the code looks like, we just hope to find better synergies with such initiative. And yes, we are looking for a designer, are you interested ?

<comment><USER10> I'm not a designer, otherwise I would help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Phone Gap? If I were Seth I'd be disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER12> excellent movement! "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." - Van Gogh</comment>


Ask HN: Life in a Google remote office? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, This summer I'll be starting my first full time job, at a Google remote office.  I having been thinking a lot lately and was wondering if being in a remote office for my first few years at Google will hurt my chances of learning the most I can.  Or if even being outside the valley will be a major mistake as well. Has anyone worked at one of these offices that can give me some insight? Also any tips for a future noogler are greatly appreciated. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Until you've made it big, no situation you'll find yourself in will be perfect. If it were easy to get ahead, they wouldn't call it work.

To answer your question, if you can't think of a better strategy, get really good at something Google needs and make lots of friends, especially those who do/hire the thing you wanna be good at. Take care of yourself, stay focused, blah blah blah. Focusing on becoming more awesome, and your awesomeness will sell itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> It largely depends on which office it is, though I think you'll find that Google has probably the best distributed engineering work force anywhere. Because there are so many engineering offices, everything is set up so that you can get the full experience no matter where in the world you are. All important meetings are streamed or recorded, and nearly every conference room has video conferencing equipment. Also, you could always transfer later if you want to join a project that's not available in your office.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just do a the best job you can for a couple of years. After you've been at Google for a couple of years, lazy hiring managers will assume you're a genius, whether you actually have any talent or not.

You'll have many more opportunities after working at Google for a few years. It's just like getting a degree from Harvard means you'll be in good shape for the rest of your career.

</comment><comment><USER5> OT: This is first time I learned about Google having remote office.

Is this full time remote?

<comment><USER6> Google has offices all over, here's a small one in Chapel Hill. NC for example: [http://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/chapel- hill/](http://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/chapel-hill/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How can I score a job at Google ?

<comment><USER6> Be smart enough. A degree from a top school can't hurt you, neither can an MS or PhD.

Dance like a monkey in the the 10 rounds of interviews or know somebody.

<comment><USER7> I am at the moment trying to get hired by the US Government as a security hacker to protect its systems against other attacks from other nations. I want to use this as a platform to eventually gain US citizenship. You know of any resources I can read up on to help me achieve this goal? Thanks a lot ..

<comment><USER6> I think most of the top government jobs are going to require clearance, which requires US citizenship.

I really have no experience or advice with what you are asking, though. Maybe go the H-1B route, get permanent residency and try for citizenship? Try and give talks at conferences like blackhat and rsa? (I really have no idea and am just guessing).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Another Mahalo Resignation - <AUTHOR> http://lonharris.com/friday-is-my-last-day-at-mahalo Unbelievable! Can't believe how Jason responds to yet another Mahalo employee stepping down... <comment><USER2> This is clearly a pun on:

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/24/how-not-to-handle-a- resigna...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/24/how-not-to-handle-a-resignation- gracefully/) (the pastebin link has expired)

and shows that at least they have a sense of humour at Mahalo.

They also have a page on Mahalo dedicated to the incident:

[http://www.mahalo.com/answers/from-email/what-is-the- worst-w...](http://www.mahalo.com/answers/from-email/what-is-the-worst-way-to- respond-to-a-resignation-letter)

</comment><comment><USER3> Should Mahalo's investors be concerned that the Mahalo CEO, former Mahalo CTO, and now-former Mahalo Community Director are all working for ThisWeekIn? Wouldn't there be a contractual clause preventing Calacanis from hiring away Mahalo staff for his new business?

<comment><USER4> In both cases our CTO and Community Director were looking to do something new after almost four years and there were people coming up behind them. They got multiple job offers from amazing companies and decided to work at one of my companies... which actually share space with Mahalo.

So, we get to keep them "in the building" and all that knowledge stays here and Mahalo gets it for free!

This is my model: hire great people, invest in them and if I can't keep them past 3-4 years at one company get them a slot at one of my other companies! :-)

<comment><USER2> > They got multiple job offers from amazing companies

You mean like yahoo! ;) ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well the whole idea behind mahalo is stupid and it only gets traffic because Jason send traffic there. But no one is thinking "I'm going to search for something, gee I'll try mahalo". Jason's link baiting is the main traffic source and mahalo will prolly be out of business at some point in the next 3 years. So maybe they fold thisweekin into mahalo and maybe get the investors something.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had 1.4M lined up for another company; I decided to ditch that and come back 'in the building' to work with Jason on ThisWeekIn. So: yeah, this is a good thing, and actually good for Mahalo, counter-intuitive as that may sound on the surface. Makes room for other great people in Mahalo to move up, who may otherwise have moved on.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, at least it's hosted on Posterous.</comment>


Finding micrometeorites in city gutters - noir-york http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21711633-amateur-enthusiast-advances-planetary-science-finding-micrometeorites-city <comment><AUTHOR> So I am going to try putting a few sets of strong magnets in my gutters just before my down pipes and inspecting them every few months.</comment>


Show HN: Sciter and Node.js versus Electron - c-smile https://terrainformatica.com/2018/12/23/sciternode-versus-electron/ <comment> c-smile Sciter's author here...

I am thinking of making Sciter as UI module for NodeJs.

1\. Strip down version of Sciter - only HTML/CSS/Graphics modules. It will use JavaScript of NodeJs (either V8 or Chackra).

2\. That version will be Open Source in the same way as NodeJs itself.

The goals are:

1\. To provide more optimal alternative to Electron - faster and far less resource consuming.

2\. Modular and reusable implementation. Example: Sciter contains my own Graphics C++ library that wraps various backends: Direct2D/Write, CoreGraphics, Skia, Cairo, GDI+. Such Graphics module library alone can be useful in other projects. Same is for HTML/CSS modules.

Not sure if all that is interesting for someone. If it is - please let me know.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need to run a vue app that can load an external file into its own frame and print that to PDF. Can sciter do that? Right now I'm using a webview in electron which lets me print just that webview to PDF.

<comment> c-smile Sciter supports print and print preview out of the box: [https://terrainformatica.com/2015/05/25/sciter3-print- previe...](https://terrainformatica.com/2015/05/25/sciter3-print-preview-is- getting-back/)

As of PDF generation: Skia backend is capable of PDF generation but that functionality is not exposed to script yet.

Another option: Windows supports PDF print drivers so you can just print on it to get PDF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Comparing the entire Visual Studio Code with a little sample IDE application is kind of barely a test at all?

<comment> c-smile That's true. Better is to compare [https://html-notepad.com](https://html- notepad.com) application. It's size is even smaller as it does not include V8.

I mean that Visual Code has way more scripts to support different languages but these are text, highly compressible, files. In any case they are not loaded all at once but RAM consumption is still 6 times more than it could be for that type of application.

<comment><USER2> VSCode has a richer UI, more functionality and of course supports extensions, source control etc by default. It just does a whole lot more. I think you'd be better off comparing with an actual port of the example compiled for each engine.

<comment> c-smile Check Typora Markdown editor: [https://typora.io/](https://typora.io/) \- it is a markdown editor made with Electron.

It has as sort of WYSIWYG editor as markdown source editing so it is conceptually close to html-notepad.

All basic ratios are the same - it consumes RAM 4-5 times more than it should. Same with distribution size and size on disk.

Yet I think that it will be fair to compare Sublime Text and Visual Code as they have close functionality. Sublime (has its own DOM and uses script for plugins) consumes 10 times less RAM than Visual Code.

Each Electron application is a full scale browser with its own JS VM instance and Node.js that is full scale web server with another instance of JS VM. It is just that for communication they use IPC rather than HTTP.

As many E applications you are running as many browsers and servers you have in memory. That is by Electron's design - nothing new here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> @c-smile - Looks interesting, does sciter offer a systray/menubar api too? Cause thats one thing I would really want in a desktop app SDK.

<comment> c-smile Check this sample : [https://github.com/c-smile/sciter- sdk/tree/master/samples/id...](https://github.com/c-smile/sciter- sdk/tree/master/samples/ideas/tray-notifications) in SDKs sciter.exe. That is tray notification.

As of menu: sdk/samples/menu

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just what I have been looking for. +1. Can't wait to take it for a test drive.</comment>


Angular vs. React – what you'll choose in 2020 if you are starting from scratch? - <AUTHOR> It has been awhile since I did any web development, and the landscape has changed completely. Javascript-based stacks seem to be the name of the game these days. If you were starting from scratch, would you choose Angular or React for a new project with a fairly complex UI? I am an experienced programmer (C++, Java, Python, etc.) but my Javascript skills are basically non-existent. I'm leaning towards React because it seems simpler and well-supported and I like the idea of also being able to use React.native for phone apps, but I'm open to other suggestions like Angular. <comment><USER2> Just my $0.02, but my experience has been that React seems simpler on the surface, but becomes more difficult to use as your project's complexity grows.

Angular appears to be more difficult on the surface, but its facilities like dependency injection, routing and form validation make your life a lot easier as your project gets more complicated.

The two frameworks are really designed to solve different problems, so doing an apples-to-apples comparison isn't really possible, although people like to do that.

Angular is designed to be a complete SPA framework, with everything you need included, except for Redux-like behavior, so you'll probably add Ngrx (or similar).

With React, you have to choose all of the bits and pieces yourself and hope everything works together. If you end up doing this over and over, and you're choosing the same things over and over, you are in fact creating your own framework.

If you need a mobile solution as well, there is NativeScript + Angular, which will allow you to continue working in TypeScript and Angular for the most part, but like any Compile-To-Native solution, it has slight differences to web development.

After working with Angular and React on non-trivial projects over the past 4 years, I will choose Angular 10/10 for its TypeScript underpinnings, consistency (since v4), huge number of built-in features and peace of mind that everything works together.

Yes Angular is opinionated. No, Angular build artifacts are not as small as React. With everything, there are trade-offs. With each framework, you'll find a huge network of highly competent, supportive developers to help you along the way.

It really just comes down to which style of development suits your style, and which one you feel will best fill the needs of your client's project goals, even if that client is yourself :)

</comment><comment><USER3> VueJS ( [https://vuejs.org](https://vuejs.org) )</comment>


Adrian Lamo-Would you hire someone that hacked your website? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/would-you-hire-someone-hacked-your-website-adrian-lamo

<comment><USER2> I would not hire or have anything to do with Adrian Lamo for any reason, that's for sure! Not after what he did in the Manning case.</comment>


Want to make money with Android? Have questions? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/android/make-money-android/

<comment><USER3> I need to warn the HN crowd. KreCi previously wrote an eBook on improving PageRank. There were a few good reviews and everything sounded great. He sold the site and the eBook on Flippa and make a few hundred bucks.

Link to his blog post: <http://www.kreci.net/blogging/pagerank-4-in-two- weeks/>

Link to the ebook site (now owned by a Flippa purchaser): <http://improve- pagerank.com/>

I ended up purchasing his book a week or so ago. It was quite terrible. The "secret" was e-mailing bloggers for back links. The book was probably about 10 pages, 9 pages were about how to set up a blog, buying a domain (with affiliate links), and then there was one page about e-mailing bloggers for backlinks, and a few example e-mails he sent.

I can't say I expected much, but I'm afraid someone else might waste their money on this sort of thing.

All this being said, I think KreCi's site is pretty interesting and there was some valuable/useful information there. I just feel a bit ripped off from the book purchase. I take it as a lesson learned, but hopefully no one else needs to learn the lesson here too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry that you were not able to use the knowledge in the ebook. Before you bought (at least in my original intro) there was a number of the pages given in the description (it was a report not ebook). As you said most reviews were positive. I sold it on flippa as I do not know how to promote it (it was sold via one of forums mostly - not my blog). Now I regret I have sold it as I believe if I would be working on it more it would be much better now and still would be selling.

Anyway it is not secret and all history may be read on my blog.

I will not make this mistake again and will not sell right to my ebook again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a HN n00b so I don't understand why this is getting promoted up so quickly. Do people not actually visit the links? No offense kreci, but there's no actual info on that page yet. Seems like pure self promotion to me.

<comment><USER5> He has been developing free Android apps for awhile now and has been posting his financial results to HN for some time now.

He lives in Poland and is unable to sell paid apps, so he can only rely on advertising for revenue.

<comment><USER4> Thanks chopsueyar, I knew there had to be a valid reason!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A side note: You web site have more text in advertising then in posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for being honest. I will try to optimize it. You are right - <USER2> last post is short and it is not looking good at all.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Questions welcome =)

<comment><USER7> Where do you think the biggest opportunities lie for passive income in Android apps? I already feel like the market is saturated and I can't come up with any ideas.

How do you come up with ideas and how long does it take for you to get them into reality? Do you outsource any of your work?</comment></comment>


Chew on this: Gum may be good for body, mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/22/chewing.gum.benefits/index.html

<comment><USER2> Yes, funded by _that_ Wrigley. <http://www.wrigleygumisgood.com/science_institute.html>

A three percent interest in a small group of about 100 doesn't get me too excited.</comment>


You can have my macbook - <AUTHOR>

I will trade my MacBook with an equivalent (Dell/IBM) laptop.
Equivalent == RAM, CPU and HDD - not price!
I am a Linux guy and just can't get no satisfaction from this machine.
Spec: CPU: 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo RAM: 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM HDD: 148.73 GB
Color: Black <comment><USER2> Instead of trying to coordinate an international machine swap, have you tried installing Ubuntu on your macbook? It works pretty well.

I've had a laptop sent to me via Israeli post before, and I got popped with a hefty import bill. I don't know if those rules have changed in the past 8 years or not, but it's something to be aware of.

<comment><AUTHOR> a) we pay no custom for computers in the last 5 years

b) installing ubuntu on it and dealing with the soundcard and the built-in camera seems to me like an headache. I think apple fans might be happier with this machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You could put Ubuntu on it, no?

<comment><USER4> I have an older macbook (Intel Core Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 93 GB hard drive) and I have similar feelings about my laptop. When I develop, I _need_ linux :)

Ubuntu does install rather well though, so I agree you should give it a try. Just 1) install Mac OS X (leave space for linux, or resize current), 2) install rEFIt, then 3) install Linux (ubuntu for macbooks is recommended). Otherwise virtualize (VMWare Fusion is better than Parallels IMHO, but either suffice).

I'll give you a tip: Every time I move over to Linux on my macbook I miss all of the little things that just work under OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aw crap, I've only got 1GB ram but everything else matches perfectly. But I'm on a Dell Latitude D530 with Ubuntu 8.04 and everything runs like f'n clockwork, right down to Compiz.

</comment><comment><USER6> How long have you had it for?

<comment><AUTHOR> 72 days</comment></comment>


AngularJS directives for Twitter's bootstrap - <AUTHOR> http://angular-ui.github.com/bootstrap/ <comment><USER2> Just wanted to comment that all the directives from <http://angular- ui.github.com/bootstrap/> are native AngularJS directives. They don't require _any_ 3rd party JavaScript dependency (jQuery, bootstrap's JS etc.). Just take Angular, 5kB library (minified, gzipped) and you are ready to go!

On top of this all those directives are fully customizable as (almost) no DOM manipulation happens in directives, markup is extracted to separate templates: <https://github.com/angular-ui/bootstrap/tree/master/template>

<comment><USER3> Am I missing something? Angular contains its own "jQuery Lite", and appears to be about 30kb gzipped.

Still, it's neat that no additional JS is required.

<comment><USER2> Actually jqLite has 2.36kB when minified / gzipped, check this for more details: [https://plus.google.com/104744871076396904202/posts/EgjErc6N...](https://plus.google.com/104744871076396904202/posts/EgjErc6NdrD)

This is over 13x less as compared to full jQuery (1.9.x): <http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/jquery-size>

so at the end of the day this might be a substantial difference.</comment></comment></comment>


Miltown: A game-changing drug (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ondrugs/miltown-a-game-changing-drug-you-ve-probably-never-heard-of-1.4237946 <comment><USER2> _" In April 1965, meprobamate was removed from the list of tranquilizers when experts ruled that the drug was a sedative, instead. The U.S. Pharmacopoeia published the ruling. At the same time, the Medical Letter disclosed that meprobamate could be addictive at doses not much above recommended. In December 1967, meprobamate was placed under abuse control amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. Records on production and distribution were required to be kept. Limits were placed on prescription duration and refills."_ [1]

I feel like the linked article mostly involve a standard and rather disingenuous way of deflecting worry about psychiatric drugs such as this.

The first point is describing the worry about psychiatric drugs in terms of their marketing - that the use of these drugs comes from marketing rather than legitimate need. Then the article goes on to describe a drug that became successful without marketing, which might, maybe, seem to deflect this criticism.

I would say that the basic criticism of psychiatric drug isn't necessarily simply that their use is spread by marketing but that portion of their use happens in the fashion of illegal drugs - they're addictively mood enhancing. Of course, aggressive sales would leverage this situation. But if you muddy the waters in your initial discussion of the supposed problem, you avoid having to deal with this particular combination of problems.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meprobamate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meprobamate)

<comment><USER3> Having taken a couple of psychiatric drugs over a long period (antidepressents - ADs), I',m not sure where your claim that "they're addictively mood enhancing" comes from. IME ADs aren't. My brother has needed to take many more (edit: diverse kinds, not just ADs). I don't think he found them addictive (or even useful).

Why do you feel they are?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is the idea to "just pop a pill" on a daily basis not wrong? It is. It totally is. You should not need to drug yourself to get through the day.

<comment><USER5> Like caffeine or nicotine? And why not? Better living through chemistry, what's wrong with that?

Also everything is a drug. Food, water, whatever.

<comment><USER6> It becomes a way to endure difficulties which should not be there in the first place.

<comment><USER3> True, but "should not be there in the first place" is a moral judgement - no- one should have to deal eg. with clinical depression or intense anxiety, or psychosis. Or painful arthritis or the rest of the evils a biological entity is prone to. But reality cares not for your or my opinion.

<comment><USER6> We create our own reality. In the EU we subsidize diary production so that powdered milk is cheap and artifically kept at a stable price, which makes food manufacturers use it as an addative in many traditional recipies which it doesn't belong in. It makes a lot of people sick, inflaming the gut, which leads to depression.

<comment><USER3> > We create our own reality

Try living with long-term chronic pain, disability and flaky mental health. Then tell me it's all in the mind.

<comment><USER5> I mean if a monk can light himself on fire and not make a noise or move at all, then anything must be possible, right? People have the ability to will themselves into almost any state, it's just incredibly difficult. There's been a number of studies on the effect of meditation on chronic pain, and it's certainly more powerful (and healthy) than painkillers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


BYTE Magazine's Lisp issue (1979) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ia902603.us.archive.org/30/items/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYTE_04-08_LISP.pdf <comment><USER2> Byte was my favorite magazine of all time - even better than Computer Shopper. ;)

I remember the last page article - Stop Bit. One particularly memorable one described how various professionals would search for an elephant. Some I recall are.

\- A C programmer would start at the southernmost point in Africa and travel east until they got to the ocean and then move north and head west to the opposite shore, repeating until they had covered all of Africa. An assembler programmer would follow the same strategy but do it on their hands and knees.

\- A college professor would prove the existence of an elephant and leave it as an exercise for the students to actually find one.

\- A marketing executive would paint a rabbit gray and call it a desktop elephant.

I wonder if I could find that article. I'll have to see if Archive.org is searchable. Or maybe I can find it by searching today: [https://www- users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/elephant.htm](https://www- users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/elephant.htm) :D

<comment><USER3> > Byte was my favorite magazine of all time

I even enjoyed the ads :)

<comment><USER3> Perhaps a nice idea for an ad-blocker: replace ads in all websites by the ads from BYTE magazine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "You can do surprising things when you have 64 kilobytes of fast RAM" ad made me realize how little we appreciate the abundant resources we are lucky to have these days...

<comment><USER5> Yup. Amusingly that statement is every bit as true today as it was in 1979, although the surprise may be of a somewhat different character.

<comment><USER6> That's why size hack contest are so much fun, like 4K intros, or java4k games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> yeah, lisp is cool, but I'd need a computer to run it on... I'm seriously considering one of those 8070 Series I Business System..... it has dual floppies, 591K bytes of storage a 19" color display, a 60 cps impact matrix computer, and!! they say at twice the price it would be a bargin, so at $7000 it seems the way to go

<comment><USER7> though I might need to get one of those fake wood veneer quad capacity two sided recording north star mini drives with 360,000 bytes per diskette!! but it has 4 drives so you can accesses over 1.4 megabytes of information.......

<comment><USER8> Who needs that much? Are you planning on putting an entire library of books on there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a subscription to BYTE magazine. That issue was how I discovered there was this amazing language called LISP.

</comment><comment><USER10> In "About the Cover" on page 4, the editor invites the reader to examine the monolith and "identify the textbook from which these S-expression fragments were taken, and the purpose of the program."

Anybody have a clue?

<comment><USER11> [http://blog.lfe.io/archaeology/2014/12/15/1848-byte- august-1...](http://blog.lfe.io/archaeology/2014/12/15/1848-byte- august-1979-the-lisp-issue/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My first issue was in 1984 (Forth Issue). I couldn't live without it, then. Until the end of Byte. We had no equivalent source of info in France. It was a fantastic and eclectic source of programming hints, ideas, whatever. I'm now 66 and retired as a Sysadmin. Very good memories. \-- cmic

</comment><comment><USER13> There is another BYTE Lisp issue: February 1988 Vol 13 No 2

<comment><USER14> Sadly, I couldn't find it on archive.org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 265MB PDF!!!

I don't think this thing is 1979 compatible.

<comment><USER7> yeah it is, you just need ~$5.4 million dollars of memory at 2cents a byte.... perhaps a kickstarter?

<comment><USER16> So how did they make magazines back then? Answer: Paper mockups made with IBM composers (typewriters that automatically justified), pasted-in paper photos, color separation negatives, and aluminum printing plate positives (one per color per page (or group of pages)). And an offset press. And folding machines, signature gatherers, binders and trimmers. No computers necessary.

<comment><USER17> Still easier than placing images in Microsoft Word.

<comment><USER18> Heh. It's gotten better but, as I can tell you from finishing up laying out a book in Word, it's still a frustrating layout tool.

Unfortunately the market has bifurcated into word processors that aren't really very good layout tools for something as complicated as a book and programs like InDesign that are complex and expensive. (Haven't looked at Scribus recently but I assume the complex point stands.)

<comment><USER19> > It's gotten better but, as I can tell you from finishing up laying out a > book in Word, it's still a frustrating layout tool.

That's... dedication.

InDesign is probably the best I've used, but it is expensive.

Inkscape is actually flexible enough to do it well, and incredibly simple on the surface, though a few quirks.

Scribus can talk to Krita, and some Photoshop stuff, which can lift the burden with some image-heavy things. Complexity wise, it looks a lot like InDesign, but can't do quite a few things it can.

But, for most people, any of the above will fit the bill.

<comment><USER18> I've never heard of using Inkscape for layout. I think of it just as a vector drawing tool.

InDesign is certainly the standard.

Things got complicated because I needed to output an interim version of the book and wanted a format collaborators could work in. Plus I thought I'd save having to re-layout the book after editing. Which of course didn't happen that way.

Lesson for next time is either live within Google Docs limitations or do layout in a proper tool only when content editing is 99.9% complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, great! This magazine is precisely as old as I am. I wasn't born with a lisp, just a fondness for it (and now I know why).

<comment><USER21> This, Creative Computing, Dr Dobbs, and Antic were my monthly computer education. I was a little ticked with what languages my Atari 400 with 48k (3rd party board) could run. I did dream a lot of some of the machines in the ads.

<comment><USER22> I loved the quirky illustrations in the early Creative Computing mags.

<comment><USER23> BYTE had some great cover illustrations too, and IIRC, even some of the articles had great diagrams or drawings. IIRC there was an artist called (Robert?) Tinney who did many of the best looking and most famous covers, including maybe for the Smalltalk issue - which I think had a multicolored balloon on the cover - just searched and this is it:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/597/1*9qr-I3aJLr0IrM256g...](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/597/1*9qr-I3aJLr0IrM256gVIvg.jpeg)

<comment><USER23> Yes, his name was Robert Tinney:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tinney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tinney)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also featuring A Preview Of The Motorola 68000!

</comment><comment><USER25> Only half of the book is advertising. But I can not deny that it is interesting. Cool

<comment><USER26> This was and probably still is something of a standard in publishing- that 50% of the "book" is ads, 50% content. My wife used to work in magazines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's the online version: [https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1979-08](https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-08)

<comment><USER28> Also [https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1979-08-rescan](https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1979-08-rescan)

It'd probably be better to point the article link there.

<comment><USER23> What's the difference (if any) in your URL and the one in the parent comment to yours (other than that yours ends with -rescan)? I could check both, but don't want to in case they are both huge pages (since someone else said 256 MB) just to find out. Is the -rescan one better quality maybe?

<comment><USER28> It's smaller and higher quality

<comment><USER23> Thanks, useful to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've got a collection of 1988-90 _AI Expert_ magazines on LISP, Prolog & Co. with interesting design features such as lino-cut-style artwork for (periodical) columns and a special Elite condensed type face for code. Does anybody know if it's ok to put these on a web site with credit when I can't get in touch with the original authors and artists (does archive.org have or need special permission from BYTE)?

Btw, I'd love links to 1986-1996ish articles on SGML and markup technologies.

<comment><USER30> AI Expert - interesting. I recall purchasing a few issues. But that's about it.

One magazine I wish I could find a complete collection of (PDF or paper, I don't care) is Robotics Age. About the only thing I have found on it is a book that was published (picked up a copy of that), but nothing else as far as the magazine is concerned.

It was kinda the Byte magazine for robotics of the 1980s era. So you had a mashup of articles for both industrial and research robotics, as well as articles and such for hobbyist robotics. It's a shame that it seems to have disappeared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I know it's totally local to french speakers, but does anyone remember Hebdogiciel or Pom's ? Both were great. The former was crazy and had lots of code in it and a very "free speech" nature (think Charlie Hebdo but for computers) and the latter was all about Apple (2, 2+, 2e, 2c; not the i-thing you're looking for)

<comment><USER32> You can find most of the old french computer magazines archived here: [http://www.abandonware-magazines.org](http://www.abandonware-magazines.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When I come across magazines from the past such as this, I keep wondering why and when did we stop writing such beautifully crafted technical articles for the masses and instead turned to advertisement-like pieces on consumer electronics. Look how empowering those articles were by treating you as a creative being, and how passivizing the current articles are in encouraging perpetual consumption.

<comment><USER34> _> technical articles for the masses_

BYTE was a niche magazine for a niche audience. BYTE was never for the masses.

Perhaps your location in Armenia separates you from the actual popularity of BYTE magazine back in the day. I remember 1990s brick&mortar bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders would carry more popular magazines like "PC Magazine"[1] and "PC Computing"[2] but they didn't have BYTE on the shelves. You had to subscribe to BYTE by mail. How did someone subscribe to BYTE if they weren't on the retail racks in the first place?!? By mailing in the BYTE subscription card (advertisement) that was placed inside of PC Magazine!

Also as trivia, BYTE was the last magazine I ever paid a subscription to (circle 1998?) because I felt cheated after paying up for a full year and after 1 issue, they shut down the operation. I got a form letter saying they would substitute with something else (Dr Dobbs? can't exactly remember) but they didn't honor their word and didn't send me a pro-rated refund for the unsent issues. Looking back, BYTE stealing my money was a godsend because it saved me from spending any $$$ on magazines for the last 20 years haha.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Magazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Magazine)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/Computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/Computing)

<comment><USER35> > BYTE was never for the masses.

Not at this stage. In 1979 is was a hobby zine for computer builders. By the mid-90's it was trying to compete against IT rags that were definitely for "mass" consumption. But early Byte was absolutely targeted at electronics experts, with a strong assumption of solid software skills.

<comment><USER34> _> By the mid-90's it was trying to compete against IT rags that were definitely for "mass" consumption. _

Yes, I agree that BYTE eventually expanded (or diluted if one chose that viewpoint) their coverage into areas that overlapped with PC Magazine etc. But they still had more of a niche audience. Here's an example issue from 1994.[1] If one flips through the pages, it has stories about CISC/RISC and Object- Oriented COBOL. It also has ads for a disk hex editor and Watcom C++ compiler. The typical computer enthusiast that's playing around with WordPerfect/Lotus and games like Microsoft Flight Simulator didn't care about geekier topics like that.

My first IT director was a programmer and even he didn't subscribe to BYTE. He did subscribe to PC Magazine and ComputerWorld.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/ByteV19N9](https://archive.org/details/ByteV19N9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What an amazing cover, anyone know if it's available as a poster or standalone graphics?

<comment><USER37> Related: what is the legal status of the magazine as it appears on archive.org? Was it put into the public domain at some point? I can't find any mention of copyright, licenses, etc. on archive.org, the Byte Wikipedia page, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great stuff, good to see again

</comment><comment><USER39> I haven't seen all ads in the magazine, but I notice that most (all?) of the companies are no longer around. Except one. The ad had a bit of a prophecy in it too: "You can't outgrow Apple."

</comment><comment><USER40> Would be interested to know if these articles are worth reading to learn about the language; i.e. ~40 years later, has the language changed too much to make the content here useful for learning purposes?

<comment><USER41> Code in Lisp in 1979 should be compatible with the current Common Lisp implementations.

However, Common Lisp (1994 ANSI standard) has interesting features that were not easily available (or standarized) on the Lisp implementations of 1979, for example the CLOS object system.

And today, with tools like Quicklisp or Alexandria, Lisp programming is really friendly. There are also some interesting recent books available, like Practical Common Lisp, and Land of Lisp.

These are all Common Lisp resources. There is also the classic "The little schemer" to learn Scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is so, damn, fantastic.

I wish I could say I'm nostalgic for it, but it predates my existence. What's it called when you yearn for the style and typography shortly before you were born?

<comment> unkown-unknowns [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50144/is- there-a...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50144/is-there-a-term- that-defines-nostalgia-for-something-youve-never-experienced)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wrote an article on hobby robots (I was working for Unimation at the time, the company that invented robots). Sadly I can't seem to find the issue online.

</comment><comment><USER44> I kept raiding the local library archives of the local army university for such back issues in the 1980s and 1990s. Great technical content.

</comment><comment><USER45> I believe I still have a copy of that issue. Does anyone remember "M-Lisp" at all?

</comment><comment><USER46> David Betz's Xlisp first appeared in BYTE I believe. It's still around.

</comment><comment><USER47> page 66 discusses the "Model of the Brain" called CMAC (Cerebellar Model Arithmetic Computer). Now I have to read up on what became of that model.

</comment><comment><USER48> Lisp is the only high-level programming language that has no syntax. In Lisp, s-expressions are used to encode both form (data structures) and function (algorithms) of computer programs. Since code and data are seen for what they are (two sides of the same coin) the distraction of a real PL syntax is eliminated, and the programmer is able to think more coherently.

<comment><USER49> Perhaps, but there's no hard evidence that lack of syntax leads to better results. All else being equal, most programmers seem to prefer at least _some_ syntax. Is a long s-expression containing multiple nested parentheses easy to think about?

<comment><USER50> A long expression containing multiple nested parentheses is no easier to think about in syntaxful languages. Re parens:

Lisp doesn't have more parentheses than other languages:

      (if (validate foo)
         (println foo "is the right answer"))

vs

      if (foo.validate()) {
        console.log(foo, "is the right answer");
      }

Unless you consider curly braces special and virtuous, and "(" parens bad.

<comment><USER51> Rust:

        if foo.validate() {
            println!("{} is the right answer", foo);
        }

This has less parentheses (unless you count the placeholder in the format string). Putting the condition in parentheses like C and friends do is redundant if you use braces for the block anyway.

<comment><USER52> less parentheses, but not less bracket-like characters. If you count parens and curlies, it is exactly the same. Yours has 4 parens and 2 curlies (not including the format string), and the original lisp code has 6 parens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((Neat)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Shit, it's not working...

<comment><USER54> You're better off with jokes about stolen source code to [big program, e.g missile defense], that it's written in LISP, and here's the last few lines as proof that you have it

      ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
      ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
      ))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

<comment><USER55> It was if err != nil {return err} rewritten in if err != nil {return err} Go, and if err != nil { return nil } this is way if err != nil {return err} more readable now.

<comment><USER41> I was thinking exactly the same thing!!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Considering Digital Ocean for startup - <AUTHOR> Anyone know difference between 'optimized' vs 'standard' digital ocean instances is? Is it really needed to get a optimized instance, rather than just standard?
If you have experience with optimized, let me know your use case, and experience.
Thanks <comment> TLo-Green Here are two blog posts that cover the differences between standard and optimized droplets:

[https://blog.digitalocean.com/a-practical-droplet- performanc...](https://blog.digitalocean.com/a-practical-droplet-performance- comparison/)

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/choosing- th...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/choosing-the-right- droplet-for-your-application)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tlo - the question was to explain YOUR experience with either or both. I read both articles myself already.</comment></comment>


Video Game Approved as Prescription Medicine - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/video-game-approved-as-prescription-medicine <comment><USER4> Quote from Matt Omernick, Akili cofounder: "As a child progresses in game play, the technology is continuously measuring their performance and using adaptive algorithms to adjust the difficulty and personalize the treatment experience for each individual." and from Web developer and designer Craig Ferguson: ""It's a well-known fact that so many mobile games use all sorts of psychological tricks to get people to give them money," he says. "So we wanted to use the same exact psychological tricks, but to trick [users] into doing something that's good for them.""

I understand that this is game is intended to help depression and anxiety. But am I alone in thinking that these states are feedback that is telling you that you are doing something wrong, that you need to make a change, rather than continuing to do something (that you may feel invested in) that isn't working for you? Or if you are bored, that you need to find something more meaningful than being distracted?

From that point of view, I feel uncomfortable with this sort of idea - that a game monitors and personalises the experience with psychological tricks in order for the child (child!) to progress as the game's developers would like. No doubt the developers have best intentions, but time outdoors, in nature, undertaking more wild experiences, allowing for boredom even - <USER2> monitoring or personalisation - are surely better options!

Basically, this line of investigation as a "solution" to depression and anxiety - ie more immersion and greater monitoring by technology - <USER3> worse than the disease to me!</comment>


Never Use Glassdoor from Work - <AUTHOR> https://lustforge.com/2014/11/02/never-user-glassdoor-from-work/ <comment><USER3> Right advice, wrong reason. Any moderate sized company will be aware that SSL makes it harder for their corporate traffic monitoring to work. They don't want SSL usage to render their monitoring software useless, so they install their own SSL root certs on machines, and relentlessly MITM all SSL traffic.

In this case, how can SSL help?

More to the point, the corporation generally has a right to monitor all computer usage you do on their machines - so posting disparaging comments about them on their own machines is a particularly dumb idea - <USER2> withstanding the Google Chrome 'Incognito Mode cannot protect you against people standing behind you' warning.

<comment><USER4> What's an easy way to find out if they're doing this? Taking a look at the certs installed in my system, unless I see "BigCo MITM Cert", I don't have a ton of insight on what certs are and aren't supposed to be there.

Also, I'm not 100% on where all certs would be found, and short of looking at the trust chain on each site I visit, I'm not actually sure how to know.

<comment><USER5> Would anyone be interested in a site that lets you see who signed the web server's cert from different points on the Internet? Sort of like IsItUp.com but for MITM.

<comment><USER6> Convergence by Moxie Marlinspike does that.

doesn't work terribly well in practice though.

[http://convergence.io/](http://convergence.io/)

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, why doesn't it work?

<comment><USER6> massive latency mostly.

although there are a lot of issues[0] on it's github page which seem to be unaddressed.

[0] - [https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence/issues](https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence/issues)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Golden rules to live by: Never use work computers for personal use, period. Your work contract more than likely specifically includes a clause.

Been there, got the T-shirt, been escorted off the premises (for sending personal emails on work time), whilst working for large US corp. This was over 15 years ago when I was starting out and I learned a very valuable lesson.

If you are a 'trouble maker' i.e. someone who asks too many undesirable questions or rocks the boat, then HR will find a way to fire you. Your work contract protects them and not you.

<comment><USER8> I do most of my personal browsing through an RDP connection to my home computer, but something that I've been concerned about: Chrome on my work computer is logged into my personal Google account. That means all of my extensions--including a password management tool--are available to my employer should they choose to log into my computer.

The conspiracy-minded part of me worries that, with the proper motivation, they could log into my email, Glassdoor, etc accounts and defensibly snoop on me since the information was technically on one of their machines. Whether this far flung possibility warrants foregoing the convenience of having all of my bookmarks and logins with me at work is unclear.

<comment><USER9> Don't do it.

Bring your personal laptop to work, browse _only_ thru the "personal hotspot" feature of your cellphone. Don't use the corporate network for _anything_ non- work-related.

You might object and say that it's obvious that you're doing "personal browsing" if you're using your personal laptop. Ok, it is obvious. So just browse during break times and lunch. You don't need to be doing extensive personal browsing from work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked for a company (Overstock.com) that on more than one occasion, during company-wide townhalls, requested that employees use Glassdoor to review the company. The feedback was reviewed by senior management to look for places to improve.

</comment><comment><USER11> Boy, I'm not sure lack of SSL is the reason you shouldn't do this!

<comment><USER12> One of the interesting tidbits of information that came out of the Lenovo spyware fiasco was that companies routinely MITM SSL traffic by installing their own certificates on company computers. Unless you own and fully control the hardware you use at work, you should just assume the company can see anything you do with it, regardless of how encrypted it looks.

<comment><USER13> My work does not even bother to install the certificate on the individual machines. I get unsigned cert errors all day long.

<comment><USER14> I would guess you use firefox which doesn't use the certs installed on the host machine by default, I also see unsigned cert errors all day long!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cloudfare has SSL even in their free accounts

[http://www.cloudflare.com/plans](http://www.cloudflare.com/plans)

<comment><USER16> True, but it is only SNI. That won't work on Windows XP and Android 2.x. I suspect that the extra cost to get traditional SSL would be worth it for Glassdoor.

<comment><USER17> I agree with that as far as Glassdoor is concerned.

However on a more general basis: I really am done caring about people still using Windows XP. I have a little sympathy for people still on Android 2.xx because those phones got sold way too long. But Windows XP hasn't been sold for almost ten years and has been EOL for more than a few.

On this topic: Does Chrome for Android 2.xx support SNI?

<comment><USER18> _On this topic: Does Chrome for Android 2.xx support SNI?_

There is no Chrome for Android 2.x... Chrome requires android 4.0+.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Canary is an anonymous, secure alternative I've been working on. Check it out if you'd like: www.canaryapp.net

</comment><comment><USER20> Darn it. Now my boss has probably tracked me reading an article about not reading glassdoor from the company network!

</comment><comment><USER21> so, what about SMS on corporate phones? ... do I even want to know?</comment>


A View into Pyongyang's Digital Life - <AUTHOR> http://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/6544875 <comment><AUTHOR> This is a podcast, so I'll summarize what I remember:

1\. They have IP blocks in China, Russia, and a satellite link through Lebanon. Since only .1% of the population has internet access, traffic shows what elites are doing.

2\. They have criminal/espionage activity via a number of countries, even New Zealand. I don't remember if this is just VPN or physical presence, except they did mention sending people to India.

3\. The normal web traffic from Pyongyang officials is fairly normal: news, media, Facebook, etc.

4\. They don't consistently use secure options such as https, and even some Tor activity was misconfigured to use the same exit router.

5\. Summaries of some of their exploits, like Swift, Wannacry, Sony, and bitcoin transfers therefrom.

6\. There wasn't any obvious activity linked to nuke or missile tests, either before or after.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice for a first-time interviewer - <AUTHOR>

Tomorrow I'm scheduled to interview someone for a developer job. I'm a programmer working on GPU computing and the candidate would fill a similar role. Being a recent graduate, though, this is my very first time sitting on the other side of the table. In 45 minutes I'm supposed to judge whether the person is a good technical and cultural fit for my company but I'm not sure how to accomplish this.<p>What advice do you have a for a first-time interviewer?<p>- Can you suggest any good systems-programming (rather than algorithmic) problem solving questions? - What is an appropriate balance between talking about prior experience and working on problems? - Any obvious first-timer pitfalls I should actively avoid? <comment><USER3> Some favorite systems programming interview questions:

* Tell me about some routines you tend to take with you from project to project; what's in "libyou.so"? Crap devs won't have any.

* Your code crashes inside the allocator. Walk me through debugging it.

* Tell me about the most interesting problem you debugged without relying on the debugger or print statements.

A question I always ask in dev interviews that isn't as systemsy is, "your typical linked list code, does it embed the list pointer in the struct, or do you have a separate list node struct with a void* in it?"

I like the questions that have no direct right answers.

One question I think you should always ask in every dev interview: "I am going to describe project XXX; it's relatively small. Give me a complete, detailed estimate of how long it will take you to do XXX." I like this question because (1) it flags people who can't estimate properly, (2) it forces them to talk through an actual project and break down the steps, (3) it catches people who don't think about testing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ask yourself if you would be happy to mentor the new employee once they are hired. If you would not, don't recommend that they be hired, even if they are technically competent. Don't forget, saying "yes" to the hire means that you will be working with them. It's easy to over-abstract the challenge of finding a good candidate, and overlooking traits like whether they are easy to work with.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't hang up too much on coding questions - just throw in plenty of technical questions and maybe get them to sketch out how they would solve one problem.

Don't deliberately try to wrong foot or otherwise trick them; pitch questions at roughly the experience level / difficulty of the job.

Write down plenty of questions so you dont run out.

Dont be "afraid" to ask for more detail. And similarly dont worry about having to provide pointers or prompts to get people started - just to keep the conversation going.

</comment><comment><USER6> First I'd say that at a company level there should be an overall plan for the interview that you fit in to. Interviews work better if the hiring manager assigns specific areas to specific interviewers, otherwise you can all end up focusing on the same area and not getting a rounded view of the candidate. (e.g. Jim - you focus on his general software engineering skills, John - <USER2> him on C++, Kate - do a resume walk etc).

In the absence of a plan (or as part of one), a good approach is to pick one or more projects from the resume and drill down into the details. Find out specifically what the candidates contribution was, what was the high level architecture his code fit in to, how was his/her piece designed/structured/laid-out, what were his interfaces to other team members, what difficulties (technical or interpersonal) arose and how were they handled, etc.

Feel free to challenge them and push a bit - why did they make the design choices they did, what would have worked better etc.

I find this approach can give you a good sense of the candidates level of contribution, their understanding of the larger scope in which they were working, their ability to debate and defend their choices, and their ability to communicate with you.

</comment><comment><USER7> FWIW: I started interviewing people in college for non-technical position although a very stressful job (favorite interview question: 'We think this job requires a sense of humor, tell us a joke'). Off and on over the years I've interviewed others for different positions. Regarding technical vs non- technical, both are the same for me; if the person is good it will show in both areas while if they stink then it will show in one area or the other.

Behavioral interviewing as mentioned in a previous post is Situation-Action- Result = SAR. Haldane I believe was the originator (Career Satisfaction and Job Success) although it might be someone else. Easy type of question to 'game' as you can construct answers to the typical questions. "Describe a situation where you made a mistake and how you fixed it."

IMHO much better to ask open ended questions. "You come across a car wreck with a person trapped inside the vehicle, what do you do?" "A 34 kV breaker continues to trip, what do you do?" "You are asked to code a function to compute compound interest, describe your actions and the code?" The idea is to find out how the person thinks; not whether the answer is right or wrong.

I'm good at interviewing people but it has taken lots of practice. One job had me as the plant tour and lunch interviewer; I could tell about the interviewee's technical skill just by the the questions they asked during the tour and at lunch. You do not have to focus on specific technical questions to find out if the person is knowledgeable. If they will fit into the group and have good learning habits then they will learn what it takes to be successful at the company. Technology changes but the ability to think and learn does not.

Ask yourself: If I had a problem, would this individual be someone that I could ask to help me solve it?

</comment><comment><USER8> The most important question you should ask yourself at the end of each interview is "Do I want this person on my team?" If you're not sure, the answer is no.

Aside from that, be wary of anyone who spends too much time talking up their accomplishments - I've often found that candidates who talk a lot falter when asked practical questions.

Also, make sure you leave time for the candidate to ask you questions. That portion of the interview can really reveal to both parties whether they would be a good fit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Behavior-based interviewing takes the approach that what the candidate did in the past is a good predictor of what they will do in the future. The problem is that it's difficult to learn to do it on your own quickly: it really helps to take a class in interviewing.

Briefly: Ask questions like "have you ever had to do X?" "What problem did you encounter doing X?" "How did you solve it?" "What would you do in this (insert common job problem) situation?" "What were the people at your last job like?" "Did everyone go out for lunch, or eat at their desks?" "Which do you prefer?" "Why?" "What did you do for lunch yesterday?" Learn to _listen_ (this is the really hard part) and respond to the answers and drill down from there. For example, for each answer he gives you, think of three questions to ask to fully plumb it out. The phrase "tell me more about that" will quickly become your friend when you can't think of anything else to say :-)

Like I said, it's hard to do this stuff on the fly. Training and practice helps :-)

Then there are all the other things like not asking illegal or biased questions (legality varies by state), etc. Businesses really need to do a better job of training their interviewers!

</comment><comment><USER10> You should be familiar with the role for which the candidate is being considered.

If you're not the hiring manager, find out what the hiring manager wants you to find out about the candidate during your interview with said candidate.

If you don't know how to implement the answer or it doesn't seem to relate to the role, there's a problem in the hiring process. ("good technical and cultural fit" is much too vague to be an answer.)

Unfortunately, you don't have enough time to figure out a solution. However, this won't be your last interview and you can get more of the answer while discussing the candidate with said hiring manager.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's not comprehensive but I like FizzBuzz.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--- Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz". \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

From <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000781.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> In 45 minutes there's not enough time to see how good the candidate is. Your goal should really be the opposite - to make sure the candidate is not obviously bad. I always come into the interview with a list of simple programming tasks, and have the person work through them until we're out of time. You can also get a 'cultural' feel for the person based on how they interact with you in the pursuit of completing the tasks.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have a range of questions prepared so you can fall back on easier questions (in case the candidate is drawing blanks or is having trouble getting past their nervousness/anxiety) or harder questions (in case they totally blow away your regular ones).</comment>


How does one remove their HN account? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to unsubscribe from your newsletter. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Apparently you cannot do this:

From [http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ](http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ):

"HN does not have a way to delete your account directly, but you can 'anonimize' your profile by removing any identifying information there. The email address is not visible for outsiders so you don't need to worry about that, simply wipe your about box and call it a day. If you used your real life name as your username it's a bit more of a problem, especially if your name is not 'John Smith', you could try emailing the owner of the site but I would reserve that to those occasions where you really think it matters.

If this is to 'unsay' stuff that you wrote in the past then that's a good reminder to think twice before you hit that submit button lest you cause someone needless work."

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, do you actually get a newsletter?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it moral to indirectly aid a corrupt government? - <AUTHOR> Recently the article "How the Iranian Government Shut Off the Internet"[1] on HN was almost popular. It talked about the complexity of the Iran's decentralized infrastructures with technical implants to give officials more influence. What this report totally overlooked was the people who designed and implemented this complex system.
Yesterday, I watched an interview[2] with a former Iran's "National information network" project employee, claiming his intentions was to improve the security of the country in general but he is deeply unhappy that it has helped the government to shut off the Internet while killing people.
As a developer and a security expert myself working for a private sector company in Iran there is almost no day in my life without thinking about the morality of my work. I have never (or even intended to) work on projects like "National information network" or other similar projects.
Alas the problem does not end here. In a country with all the infrastructures controlled by government, naturally most of our customers are important government-affiliated organizations. Because of our company's position and considering the NDAs, the developers are not supposed to know the customers. Alas, this is just theory. I know a lot of our customers and some of them are pretty bad, very very bad, with bloody hands even in this weeks suppressions.
I don't think our product is used for killing people, but what if it indirectly aids those organizations to achieve their nasty goals? This question drives me crazy and I am not alone. There are lots of ethical developers in my country working directly or indirectly for such organizations. I have lots of friends, former employees of companies with censorship/monitoring projects that has left the country for new jobs. Seriously, what other options do we have?
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/iran-internet-shutoff
[2] In Persian, https://www.bbc.com/persian/iran-50504210
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258 <comment><USER2> This is a subjective topic, as moral decisions are individually made based on the morals the individual subscribes to. If the individual doesn't feel guilty about doing this, then how can anyone else claim they are amoral?

Socrates said, "To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom." This is what I believe he meant, to know what your own morals are. If you know them, you cannot violate your own conscience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Read Nein! by Paddy Ashdown. Then use your imagination.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it moral(ethical) to work for Google?</comment>


Hardwired differences between male and female brains discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-hardwired-difference-between-male-and-female-brains-could-explain-why-men-are-better-at-map-reading-8978248.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone have a link to the actual study?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the best I could find:

[http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/2013/12/verma/](http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/2013/12/verma/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: PHP coders, what's preventing you from changing language? - <AUTHOR>

The flavor du jour today on HN come from a couple of articles describing the difficulties programmers have moving away from PHP, despite admitting that the language is somewhat broken.
I want to ask PHP devs on HN:
- have you considered moving away from PHP?
 - do you know any other language?
 - did you ever attempt writing a non-trivial app in something else than PHP?
 - what should be done to help you move more easily, if only by curiosity to see something else? <comment><USER2> From my experience, some things that tend to trip people up in transition attempts:

\- choice paralysis - With Python, you must first decide whether you want to invest in Django or Flask (or whatever). Then you get to decide whether to invest in Mako or Jinja (or whatever). etc, etc. W/ Ruby, you have Rails vs Sinatra. ERB, Haml, etc etc. In that sense, PHP is realistically more "convention-over-configuration" than the competition (whether MySQL for data persistence and raw HTML in templates are good defaults is a whole separate discussion)

\- poor interop w/ real world - good luck convincing a client to sign up for Node.js hosting. Or explaining that it doesn't come w/ wordpress (or phpbb or squirrelmail or pretty much anything not-so-sexy-to-develop-these-days-but- widely-used-by-non-techies.)

\- no measurable benefit - most levels of abstraction have comparable complexity in all languages, i.e. using ERB or raw PHP (or Jinja, or mustache, or whatever) generally take the same time and the same effort to write/maintain - code debts come from other factors (e.g. team member inexperience). In addition, most levels of abstraction quickly get cross- ported between projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd move away in a heartbeat. I don't HATE PHP, but I do resent being forced into it. I also hate the CMS's my job makes me use - WordPress and Drupal mostly, but often some custom stuff pops up.

Reasons I haven't:

1\. I can't relocate again. I did for a job that didn't pan out, and now we have a home, a newborn son, and his grandparents moving out here (~2000 miles away). Just not feasible.

2\. I'm up near Seattle and it seems all the Listed jobs are Microsoft languages, Java or require a lot of experience. I rarely even see a Jr. Level job and it is 3+ years experience when they show up. I have about 3 years experience at the moment, with PHP though...

3\. I actually have a CIS degree, which is a B.S but isn't "true CS" as I didn't go above Calc I in maths. My C exposure was one class in college, and I'm kinda scared of C++...

4\. Maybe it's impostors syndrome but I don't feel qualified yet to be a "real" programmer. I'm actually quite happy doing web development. There are challenges, and my lack of education in algorithms and maths aren't really an issue at this point.

5\. New son, wife, own a house, all of these really restrict my personal project time. That and I'm really into weightlifting at this point, and I have other hobbies, which doesn't help either.

Excuses? Probably, but it isn't that I'm unwilling to move away from PHP, its that it is just not that convenient.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Moving" from a language is a laughable concept for me.

As professionals, we tend to work with many constraints in play, and one of them, most of the time, is the language. It's not that the client requires me to use PHP, but not using it will be a hassle for the client afterwards, mainly, because of hosting and maintenance. Python and Ruby devs are quite rare where I live, thus, using PHP enables the client to find maintainers easily down the road.

Technically, I have no problem moving from one language to another (though, never tried a functional language), and I've done professional work using ruby in the past.

Frankly, reading HN discussions about PHP, I feel like they're missing the point, or maybe, it's because I live in a country where PHP is prevalent - there's a whole market here for PHP devs, I've been doing contract work for almost 3years now using XHTML/CSS/JS/PHP stack exclusively, most of the time with a framework, or even a CMS.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this question assumes a premise that many of the people that use PHP would not agree with. For that reason, the responses you get may be biased.

I am a part time developer that uses PHP, and there are a number of reasons I haven't moved off it for back end work. The first is that although it seems to be the target of dislike from those working on the bleeding edge, it is as popular as it is for good reasons. It has flaws, sure, but it is loads better than it was a few years ago, and it will continue to improve.

There are usually two ways that people change something. The first is being 'pushed' - something being so bad you seek out a replacement, the second being 'pulled' - seeing something so compelling in another product you have to switch. PHP isn't something that will push you away from it, I believe those switching are being pulled to other languages because of whatever nifty features they provide. In cases where you are working in established development environments on established projects, the switching costs are rarely justified for the marginal improvements.

I use PHP because it does everything I want it to, and its what I know. Familiarity has a huge advantage and to sacrifice short term productivity for possible long term gain is something that is easy to put off. Another thing that I love about PHP is its ubiquity and how easy it is to get in to start writing with it.

Fairly recently, I did seriously consider making the switch and giving two other languages a month each to see how they worked for me. What actually stopped me from doing this is that around the same time a lot of my work changed from server-side to client-side programming. My back end programming in my recent projects acts more like a simple interface between my client software and database than anything else, so I have been doing very little of it.

I have a few questions in response, and I ask these as someone genuinely curious.

How big do you think the gain is between working in PHP and working in <other language>? What do you think that other languages may be lacking that PHP doesn't that may make people not want to move?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll move away from PHP when it can't do what I need it to do. Simple as that.

<comment><USER7> That's how I felt about my horse and buggy. I rode it everywhere until I took an arrow to the knee.

<comment><USER8> a car and horse analogy, applies to PHP vs what language specifically?

Because PHP is pretty performant, especially if you have op code caching or maybe even HipHop from Facebook that makes it even more faster.

<comment><USER9> It's not about runtime performance as much as programmer performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me the biggest challenge is that at the company that I work for is too strict in trying out "unknown" technologies. So I can only learn in my free time. I don't really have any real project ideas in which I can try out my knowledge, so I forget the most of what I learned a few weeks ago. I think it's hard to change, when your job ties you to php. And in my country (Hungary) anything other than php, or java for web development is pretty unknown.

</comment><comment><USER8> it's cheap, it's fast enough, it's everywhere, tons of docs/examples/plugins/support. It just works. If PHP can't do what I want it to do, then I will use something else.

</comment><comment><USER11> The thing preventing me from changing languages? The fact that there isn't a fork of PHP that has fixed all the major complaints?

Someone was working on one. PHP is open source. It could exist. It could be POPULAR!

But no.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a PHP dev who wants to escape. I'm trying to learn Ruby on Rails, but not doing well. I know functional Ruby and a fair bit of JavaScript.

The main barrier to my leaving PHP is that it basically forces me to use OOP. I want to use OOP, but I haven't got my head around it, and I'm yet to be persuaded that it's worth it and I don't really fully get the benefits.

Materials on learning Ruby and other languages tend to miss out that jump, which is the biggest one for me. Any ideas for getting me up to speed on OOP fully?

<comment><USER10> Try this: <http://ruby.railstutorial.org/> (there is a free online book version). I think this is quite good for start. At least it was for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I consider moving to PHP for small projects for which Java Servlet/JEE imposes too much ceremonial overhead. I have never used PHP but I see that it is widely used on the Web ( [http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_languag...](http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all) ), esp. for CMS' ... and it seems to work quite well for quickly and painlessly developing Web applications.

</comment><comment><USER14> semicolons and brackets

</comment><comment><USER15> The language may be somewhat broken, but it's very far from being broken enough to be moving away from it.</comment>


Simple to-the-point youtube to mp3 converter - <AUTHOR> http://url-to-mp3.com/

<comment><USER2> Does use of this web application not break Youtube terms and conditions? Good luck with it.</comment>


Show HN: Content Directory for Organizing, Finding and Sharing Great Resources - <AUTHOR> https://www.fluffzy.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Guys,

Me and my co-founder having hard time to find great resources because of noisy web , and to organize our pile of tabs. So, we build a place where like minded people can share best resources under a subject as a collection to teach one another and store their links whether privately or publicly.

We were frustrated by tab pile in our browsers and also we hate to lose time on fluff content.

*we didn't have time to change actual landing page so we used our old website builder account to create new landing page but actual sites name is jooseph</comment>


What happens to your bike after it's stolen - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-profiles/articles/this-is-what-happens-to-your-bike-after-its-stolen-october-2014 <comment><USER2> Somewhere in the last year or so I read an article arguing that the reason bike theft is so attractive is that although the reward (to the thief) of the crime is small, the risk is practically zero. The suggestion was that if the police managed to successfully investigate and prosecute even a small fraction of bike thefts, they could increase the risk to the thief by several orders of magnitude. Since the reward is so small, this could effectively deter at least casual theft.

There would probably still be professionals stealing expensive bikes, I suppose, but still, this seems worth trying.

<comment><USER3> What if the cost of investigating, prosecuting and sentencing is 100x more than what the bike is worth (very conservative guess)?

<comment><USER4> $1k bikes are naturally pretty common targets for theft (as it's pretty easy to break a $100 lock. More expensive bikes generally doesn't mean better security, but it often means more demand to steal it).

At that price, I really wouldn't consider 100k to investigate, prosecute and sentence a very conservative guess. Seems a bit on the high end. Stealing a bike doesn't result in jail generally (expensive). The prosecution is usually quick and easy (tons of similar cases) and the penalty is usually a fine for first-time offenders.

What you also often see in crime is the 80/20 effect. For example here in Amsterdam they created a list of 500 people who often ran into trouble with the police and focused a lot of effort on them. As each and every one of them plans and executes on an elaborate theft say once a month, they're responsible for more than 10 of such cases every single day. The other thousands of people who commit a theft might do it incidentally, like once every few years or once in their life, and usually not something elaborate.

Same with bike theft, I think. I've actually seen big vans with a team of 3 operate at night. They'll throw 15 bikes that are locked but not attached into the van in the span of 5 minutes with the 3 of em, then drive off to some garage and spend the next 5 hours relaxed cutting through the locks in comfort with the right tools. They'll switch neighborhoods every now and then, and sell 20 at a time to struggling obscure bike shops that need a bigger profit than what they can get if they buy straight from the factory.

If you have 2-3 of such teams operate in your city and do two weekly runs that's easily a million bucks, that's, you can probably get rid of them for a few hundred thousand bucks and recuperate 100k from the thieves. But you prevent a million in theft and restore a bit of social order. Of course it's not just the theft, it's also the broken-window theory stuff. The notion of escalating crime, and of affluent people moving to other places if you let this + 50 other things like this slip, and you end up with dropping rents and an imbalance of disproportionate amounts of low-socioeconomic individuals living there. Bit of a slippery slope argument I know but it's not far from the truth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm reminded of this delicious line by a San Francisco bike guru:

"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another."

(From this lengthy and fascinating first-hand account of a reporter's attempt to recover his stolen bicycle)

[http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen- bicycle?pag...](http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/13/chasing-my-stolen- bicycle?page=0,1)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great read. Nothing seems to have changed much since 2007.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Any bike thief worth his shim knows you've got to liquidate the rolling > booty via parts

When I lived in New York in the mid-2000's it was pretty common to find folks trying to sell stolen bikes for $20 in public parks. Being younger with less sense and having lost a couple of bikes myself, I would sometimes get in their faces. That was a dumb idea, cf. the screwdriver anecdote in the article.

It was also an open secret that local restaurants bought stolen bikes for delivery workers and just covered them up in duct tape. I'm sure this doesn't explain 100% of bike thefts.

Maybe in Seattle chop shops are necessary, but in New York the problem seems so overwhelming that that just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary effort. The police generally could not care less.

<comment><USER7> My bike was stolen in London in 2009, the day before I went on holiday.

I found it on Gumtree (like Craigslist) the next day. I stuck the phone number in Google, and a load of other Gumtree adverts popped up -- "Call Dave" "Call Pete" "Call Andy". I sent this to the police. An officer phoned a few days later, and was really pleased and surprised at what I'd been able to do. She said she'd pass it on to the "intelligence team".

Nothing seems to have changed since then: [https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=07796163182) (I picked one advert at random.)

<comment><USER4> Heh, similar experience here. In fact I'm part of a facebook group for 2nd hand stuff, one dude always posts bikes for sale there, like 2-3 a week, but from like 50 different accounts. (hey it takes 1 minute and the bike sells for ~$100) Problem? He makes the pictures in his garden with a very particular fence I always recognize.

I wasn't quite sure if he was just a repair guy with a small business, someone buying cheap broken bikes and fixing them up, using FB as a sales channel, or a proper thief. Until one day I saw someone comment on one of his bikes on facebook saying he went to buy a bike and that the guy had an elaborate camera and a television screen to see if the police rang the bell or just a regular buyer as well as some other negative comments.

Police didn't seem to pick up the case though, he's still at it. But yeah I always put the phone number in google, if I get a load of different names I just move on. It doesn't happen that often, but when something is too good to be true it happens like 9/10 times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My uncle observed this in his thesis: 'the combined weight of lock and bicycle is a constant'.

</comment><comment><USER9> In Copenhagen, Denmark where bike riding and bike theft is very common, the police does little about it. In fact it came out recently that the police have an unofficial policy of not investigating thefts of value less than 13.000 euros due to "lack of resources".

There is seldom story of say an angry man in a van running down two kids on a stolen scooter otherwise vigilante justice is very rare.

I think for most bike thiefs are just having field day (year or decade) and probably quite a bit more organized than in Seattle due to massive market for bikes and bike parts here in Copenhagen.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that stole danish bikes are sold in Denmark, not whole nor in parts. They are loaded on to truck and moved out of the country.

I believe that most Danes buy their bikes part in stores (physical or online), making the market for stolen part very small.

I understand that the police doesn't have resources to investigate every single bike theft, but perhaps if they looked at on a case by case basis and looked at the problem as a whole, then maybe the economy would be vastly different. If 100 bikes are stolen, they aren't being stolen by a 100 different people, more likely just a few people are responsible for the majority of those thefts. I worked at a company where the entire bike rack was stole at once, a truck backed up and the entire row of 30+ bikes was stolen. Because of how the system works the police will get 30 different cases of stole bike, each of which isn't worth looking into.

It's a bit different from the US, because Denmark is much much small, but if the Danish police said "The next 3 to 5 years we invest heavily in finding bikes and preventing bike theft" then you wouldn't need to do much after that, because the criminal would have moved to a different country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder to what extend the intensity of bike theft will incentivize bike users to buy and use bikes of low value. I have conflicting anecdotal experiences about this. I lived in Rotterdam, where bike theft is intense, but where people usually ride cheap bikes every day, and where you know you can buy a cheap bike to someone in the street, for a price as low a ten euros. Bikes are a cheap commodity in Rotterdam. In San Francisco, also a bike theft intensive city, people seem to be undeterred in riding expensive bikes, and the expected price is in the hundreds of dollars.

The difference might be that bikes sleep outside much more often in Rotterdam than in San Francisco.

edit: typos

<comment><USER12> Are lower income people in SF riding expensive bikes, or just the well-paid ones? If bike-riding is a rich person's thing in SF, then the average rider will have spare cash to throw at it, stores can focus on selling more expensive bikes, higher prices are normalised...etc.

<comment><USER13> It's mostly younger people ride bikes, but because of the availability of bike lanes and public bike racks, more and more people from all incomes are riding bikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So what is the solution to bikes getting stolen? It seems like we cannot really make locks that are cheap enough to manufacture to prevent thieves from stealing bikes/harvesting them for parts.

Do we put GPS trackers on all bikes? Can we enforce harsher punishment for bike thieves?

<comment><USER15> I think bait bikes are a good solution. Put out a few normal looking bikes with gps trackers in them, and have stiff fines for those who get caught. Making locks safe against an angle grinder isnt really feasible, but making someone think twice before even trying because it's a bait bike might work.

<comment><USER16> Only three problems with that:

Firstly, bait bikes are inevitably going to be cheap bikes. Thieves are more interested in expensive bikes - and if the expensive bikes are not only more profitable, but also safer to steal, then they're bound to step up their lock- picking and angle-grinding game.

Secondly, finding someone to organise this would be difficult. Any single organisation sufficiently large enough to do this would be bureaucratic enough to insist on the same make/model of bike (for the obvious homogeneity benefits), which would make them as obvious as an undercover Crown Vic. Conversely, any kind of grassroots or community effort would (by design) need to alert as many people as possible to the venture, including the bike thieves themselves - thus spoiling it before it even begins.

Finally, these things are chop-shopped almost the instant they get on-sold. Tearing a bike down can be done in a public park in 5 minutes flat with a pocket's worth of tools. The bike thieves can adapt a lot more easily than the sting operators.

<comment><USER17> You make a couple of assumtions that are just weird.

There's no reason to assume tha bait bikes are going to be cheap bikes, nor that all bait bikes would be the same make and model.

<comment><USER16> Bait bikes of a make/model make sense _in a sufficiently bureaucratic organisation_ because it makes purchasing, tooling and technician training a hell of lot easier. Police cars (Crown Victorias) are obvious for the benefit of a few chases/crashes, when police fleets could have been a bit more surreptitious. I don't see a large organisations doing any different in selecting a "perfect bike to steal".

I assumed cheap bikes because of Ainmats[1] ratio of 1 in 100 bikes being trap bikes. 1 in 100 in any reasonably-sized city means tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars of kit (including GPS), and anyone with that kind of scratch has _someone_ trying to minimise expenditure. Or, why spring for a Trek Butterfly to catch a hungry junkie when a Huffy would net hundreds of the same?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8818498)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is incorrect. Kryptonite U-Locks cannot be picked with a bic pen. That hasn't been the case since 2005. That was only a certain model, and once made public they fixed it and offered free replacements.

<comment><USER19> "Certain model" means literally every Kryptonite U-lock, except for the New York series, made prior to 2005.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I follow two principles to avoid bike theft: 1. always lock both wheels and the frame up with a very thick U lock, and 2. ride a bike less expensive to replace than repair. I regularly find bikes at Goodwill, flea markets, etc that are not stolen but are dirt cheap ($50, $100, etc). Even found a banged up old bike (dead tires, bad derailleur/gears) laying in a gutter. May not be the best ride in the world but it gets you from point A to B and never gets stolen.

As for preventing theft in general, don't leave it locked up outside. That'd probably cut down on 90% of thefts. They could improve outside safety by building special wire mesh enclosures for bikes on bike racks, which would make it more difficult to steal, more obvious someone is stealing, and generally protect the bike from vandalism and the weather.

<comment><USER21> > don't leave it locked up outside. If I stopped locking my bike outside, I > would likely never use it in the city.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"... Fortunately for Rosa, the Darlings were also allegedly fencing electronics, allowing the owner of a stolen iPad to track his missing tablet to the same apartment via an iPhone app connected to his iPad's GPS. ..."_

Would be a nice hack to build something like this. How would you embed a device like this into into a frame & other parts?

Comments: _"... Ryan Scheel: Might it make sense to put a GPS device in bikes encrypted with a private key that only your computer has access to? ..."_

RFID inventory of parts unique to a bike?

Would be interesting if each (high value) part had a unique serial number unique to the bike. Small RFID devices for the frame, wheels, seat brakes registered to a unique frame? That way each part could be tied to a frame & identifiable to one bike.

<comment><USER22> If you are serious, the answer is to make the device a 1" tube that fits into the steer tube of most bicycles and can receive and transmit RF via the top cap (which would be plastic rather than the usual metal). Easy to conceal, near-universal fit (for bikes from the last 10+ years), sufficient space for a battery, radio, no visible parts. Charge using the tube as ground and the top cap bolt as hot.

The problem is, it will cost $150 or so, plus monthly cellular data fees (you can dial 911 for free, but the police will not do anything with this).

<comment><USER23> I thought this sounded familiar, so I did some searching... here's pretty much exactly that:

[http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp](http://www.integratedtrackers.com/GPSTrack/Spybike.jsp)

<comment><USER22> Wow, thanks for digging that up. It even costs $152 right now (converted from GBP). Apart from the fact that you seemingly have to remove it to charge, looks good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you have a nice bike, take a moment to register it: [https://bikeindex.org/](https://bikeindex.org/)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for recommending the Bike Index! We recommend registering even if you have a cheap bike, since it's easy and free.

Here's another article about what to do if your bike is stolen - [https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you- bike...](https://medium.com/@stolenbikessfo/what-to-do-after-you-bike-has- been-stolen-in-the-bay-area-e08e6b6f005b)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _You can rip off a bike and trade it for a $50 bag of drugs pretty easily_

> _The components, meanwhile—the lights, seats, handlebars, derailleurs, and > brakes that turn a frame into a ridable bike—can go for hundreds of dollars > each on the black market_

If the whole bike sells for $20, how can each component sell for "hundreds of dollars each"???

> _her $8,300 Seven Mudhoney disappeared_

I didn't know bikes that expensive even existed.

So maybe the parts that sell for "hundreds of dollars" come from $8k bikes, and bikes that sell for 20 bucks are the cheap ones; but the article isn't clear on this.

It seems that owners of $8k bikes should refrain from buying parts on the black market, and that they can afford the small overhead (but added security) of only buying from legitimate dealerships?

\- - -

Regarding the problem of bikes steal, is it better or worse to have a system of public bikes that can be rented for cheap? Paris (and London, and many other cities) have a system of public bikes that are available everywhere and that are very cheap to rent; I know those bikes get stolen (or broken) sometimes but they cannot really be resold as you can't legitimately "own" one.

It would be interesting to compare the numbers of bike thefts for cities that have public bikes versus ones that don't.

<comment><USER27> The difference is between a junkie quickly selling a bike to get a fix as fast as possible, and splitting the bike into components and knowing the right people to buy them.

The junkie doesn't give a shit about tearing the bike down and getting the best price, he just wants to shoot up and will take whatever he can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Priceonomics wrote another interesting article on the subject:

[http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what- happens-t...](http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-to- stolen-bicycles)

</comment><comment><USER29> An interesting local stat for Santa Cruz. According to the article, given Seattle has a population of about 650k, they are dealing with one bike stolen per 580 residents. During the last year, the reported bike thefts in Santa Cruz city was 404 and with a population of 65k, we are looking at one theft per 160 residents.

Wherever there is a drug trade and a high transient/drug user population, there will be issues with bike theft. Where I live it is _bad_

</comment><comment><USER30> Tracking devices in about 1 in 100 bikes would put a dent in the problem. Hidden deep inside the frame, you'd find the chop shops.

</comment><comment><USER31> Back when I rode a bike to work, I parked it next to my desk.

</comment><comment><USER32> reminds me of this movie [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I know the Constituion forbids it, but I think cruel and unusual punishment is A-OK when it comes to bike thieves.

<comment><USER34> Horse theft used to be a capital crime. Under the same constiution we have now.

<comment><USER35> Horses are like bikes with personalities, I can understand some of the reasoning.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A rap song about some issues in tech - <AUTHOR> Song url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE1w5FTg68c
Quick background on the project: I'm a full time programmer and I love making rap music. I see a lot of humor in the profession/industry, and thought it would be fun to combine the two.
I'm always open to feedback on audio quality/topic ideas/ways to get more exposure/etc! I am also open to collaboration with beat makers/videographers/producers! <comment><USER2> Definitely respect your hard work, I wish you the best with your music!</comment>